


genesis, again.

by Ias



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-06
Updated: 2016-02-06
Packaged: 2018-05-18 13:23:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5930017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ias/pseuds/Ias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world was fire and blood. That was how it used to be. In the new world, the one they've made for themselves, fire and blood won't cut it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	genesis, again.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tide_ms](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tide_ms/gifts).



> “People believe, thought Shadow. It's what people do. They believe, and then they do not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust the conjuration. People populate the darkness; with ghosts, with gods, with electrons, with tales.”

Toast knows about myths.

Miss Giddy unwound them, her frank voice creaking as her fingers traced the words that inked her skin, reading herself like braille. In the beginning, there was God. In the beginning, there was darkness. In the beginning, there was nothing.

In _their_ beginning, there was fire and blood. And sand, and heat, and too much light, and a lot of other things—a bad beginning, not a clean one, but in the days since her spit cooled on the ruin of Immortan Joe’s face, Toast has come to realize that you don’t get to choose the myths that make you. The myths were there, all along, deep down where you never felt them, the bone on which the meat sat. The sand and heat and light had stripped out everything else, had eaten almost everything. Those that survived were left with something new—but Toast didn’t know what. Whatever it was, it would have to do.

And so.

In the beginning, there was fire and blood. The Wives took the fire, and they boiled the blood—they baked it in a furnace, until it had turned into fertile clay. The meek and righteous were spared the Fury Road, and they would live to grow their crops in the hardened blood and reap a rich reward.

That's as far as Toast gets in the myth-making business. Creating your own origin story is tough work, and there's plenty tougher work to be done. But maybe it will help them somehow, having a story. Stories have helped her. She had let her outside get as tough as leather, and before long she might have been stone. But stories kept something alive. Deep down. The bone on which her meat sat. Maybe if they have a story, they can read it and see where to go next.

But there are parts that don’t fit in. Things she still doesn’t understand.

In the beginning, there was fire and blood—and a one-armed woman who never smiled, but promised to take them away.

 

 

In a way, it was Furiosa that created the world for them to live in. But Furiosa stands beside them, more immortal than Joe could ever have styled himself.

Toast looks at her every day. _Who are you?_ Rig-driver. War-bitch. Imperator. When Toast rounds a corner of Immortan Joe’s palace (and it will always be his, at least to her, no matter how often she strikes the name from her mind) and sees Furiosa there, she finds a prickle running down the back of her neck. What isn’t known is always dangerous. And she knows nothing of Furiosa, nothing at all.

To Toast and the rest of the wives, Furiosa was always more than her titles. She was their deliverer. But now she is not even that, for the cargo has been delivered, and Toast sees it clearly as they scrape their society off the wall where Immortan Joe and the desert and the world had bashed its brains out. Furiosa is a relic of a different time, a god of a finished world. They don’t need her here.

It was Angharad that she confided in. Angharad who won Furiosa to their cause. Angharad, always Angharad, who wiped the sweat from their brows and the blood from their thighs, who knew everything and said very little. Toast had often wondered how she had done it, what favors Angharad had promised and given. It was only after she came to see Furiosa clearly that she realized she was not the type to accept a favor, no matter how freely offered. Favors were merely obligations in disguise, after all.

They made quite a pair, the two of them. The mother-goddess and the elemental, if you tilted your head and squinted.

And Furiosa, who is no longer rig-driver or war-bitch or Imperator, goes into the desert. Toast does not know what she does out there—she doubts anyone does. Furiosa always returns after a few days, often with enough salvage to justify using the gasoline.

“I want to come with you,” Toast says.

Furiosa looks at her only briefly. Toast expected nothing more. It was always Angharad she had favored.

Toast remembers how they would sit up when the others were asleep, back when they all still lived in a nightmare. Toast had lain away and listened with every fiber of her being, bending an ear to their conversation as if reaching for a lifeline. She could never make out the words—only the quiet cast of their voices, the utter deflation of two people accustomed to nothing but force slowly discovering something else.

Toast doesn’t know, has never known, what Angharad was thinking or feeling. She does suspect that Furiosa was in love with her—in that silent, blunt-faced way. Nothing would have come of it. Not back then. None of them had been creatures accustomed to softness that didn’t come poisoned.

Then the nightmare had dissolved into a dream, too strange and good to be real. This couldn’t be reality. It all worked out too well.

They didn’t eat as well as they used to, but there was some satisfaction—a lot of it, actually—in knowing that the food was going into other bellies whose starvation-wracked frames needed it more than theirs. They all lived in the mountain now—Cheedo had wanted to take all the equipment for making war and break it into a pile at the mountains’ feet. Toast had stopped it before Furiosa had needed to step in. They had saved themselves, but not the world. Cheedo wanted a symbol that things would never go back to the way they were. But a flag announcing their new world’s total inability to defend itself was not what they needed.  

Furiosa looks in on what was left of the war-boys, pups scarcely old enough to understand the life which had been chosen for them, then taken away. There’s hope for them, she says, though not in words such as those. ‘Hope’ does not feel easy on a tongue like hers. When the paint was washed off the pups look like any other. It was Capable who demanded they be given a chance, who spent hour after hour sitting with them and trying to teach them to be human again. Toast had never thought of them as children before—merely seeds, quickly growing into yet another poisonous weed. Capable thought differently. No one commented on the weight she bore in her heart, though they could see it on her shoulders and sucking in her eyes.

And Furiosa leaves, becoming nothing more than a dark smudge, a cloud of dust, and then nothing. Maybe it was habit that sent her out, again and again. Toast doesn’t think so. There is no place for her in this new world, but she isn’t like Max—she had made a mistake, let herself get pulled too far in, and now she can’t get away no matter how far away she drives. But sometimes, Toast worries. Sometimes she watches that plume of dust and thinks about a future in which Furiosa never comes back.

She tries not to think about it for long. It doesn’t make a very good story.

Of course, Immortan Joe was a god. Or at least, people worshiped him as one. And now he’s dead—the pantheon has fallen. But people need gods. So they came up with new ones.

Toast has seen the murals springing up like shoots in a field, smeared on the rough rock wall in paint the color of blood and rust, the smoke of charcoal darkening the shadows. New gods, familiar gods. There are six of them. Toast can always recognize herself, the small dark one with the shortest hair. In the pictures she stands at the side of a golem with a sword in her arm, or perhaps her arm is the sword. Furiosa has her place in the pantheon too. The god of war. But this is peacetime.

“Where do you go?” Toast asks, standing in the back of the garage as Furiosa makes ready.

“Why do you ask so many questions?” Furiosa says, her voice toneless, mocking without malice. Her words are only sharp when she needs them to be. Most of the time they are parries, deflections, enough menace to deter any further foray. Furiosa makes a good warrior-goddess, Toast decides. She avoids conflict at all costs, and when it finds her she holds nothing back.

Toast picks up a wrench, hefts it in her hand before setting it down. “Maybe if you gave me some answers once in a while, I wouldn’t have to ask them.”

Furiosa, unsurprisingly, is silent. There’s something easy about talking to her, the knowledge that silence will stretch out as long as Toast wants it to. But she doesn’t want silence now. She wants—well, she isn’t sure. Wanting things was never a healthy pursuit in the past. She’s still getting used to the idea.

The plume of dust on the horizon dies away. Toast wanders through Furiosa’s workshop, idly touching the things that line Furiosa’s innermost life. A box of screws. A rack of dirty rags. A jug of oil. Toast dips her fingers in and immediately gets it all over her clothes and skin. She thinks about smearing it over her forehead and finding a mirror, but what would she see? It’s not her mask to wear.

 

 

Sometimes when Toast walks the halls, the people who see and recognize her (and it seems they always recognize her) will give her things. Little gifts, so small and worthless she has no difficulty accepting them, as strange as it feels. Toast compares her tribute with the other wives’, screws shined to steely brightness, stones with emblems carved in pale white scratches. They have no shrine for their believers to lay their offerings.

“Things will change,” Capable says. “They’ll forget we were ever people at all—maybe even when we’re still alive. It’s happening now. Gods that live on earth never last for long.”

“Not while there’s people like us to rip their bloody faces off,” The Dag says with a grin, her teeth and hair the color of bone, her eyes the color of the blue sky that baked them clean. What place will she have when the new pantheon finds its feet? Toast sees her as the keeper of the underworld, quick and sharp with a wicked laugh, and Cheedo as the spring goddess that fell into her clutches. Dirt is their province, for graves and for growing things—together they keep the seeds. Capable is the caretaker, ever walking among the people and healing with a touch, a word. Angharad the holy martyr, the absent high-queen.

And Toast—well, it doesn’t seem right to choose for herself. You can’t pick your myths. Only carve out the shape they’ll eventually fill.

So much remains to be seen. New stories sprout up over time, and before long Toast gives up on refuting them. As it stands now, Furiosa wrecked the war rig by grabbing it with her metal arm and swinging it over her head like a lasso. Last month the stories were different, and different again the month before. Their bones are soft still, but not the softness of rad-rot—they’re like babies, the old, good kind, the kind Immortan Joe wanted so very badly. They were soft at first too. Strength and solidity comes over time.

“Have you seen the murals?” Toast asks. She’s never sure what makes her ask these things. She hardly ever gets an answer. But there’s a power in the asking, she supposes. The knowledge that Furiosa is listening.

“They’re saying you wrecked Immortan’s war rig by grabbing onto it with your metal arm and throwing it over your head.”

“People say all sorts of stupid things,” Furiosa replies.

“Not you. You never say anything.”

“Maybe I’m just not stupid.”

“Just because you never say it doesn’t mean you ain’t thinking it.”

Toast might be wrong, but she thinks she sees the crease of a laugh at the corners of Furiosa’s mouth. It’s smoothed away quickly enough. Toast doesn’t want to be wrong.

“You know, if you don’t want to tell me where you go, you could always just show me.”

It’s not a sentiment Toast expects any answer to. But Furiosa turns to her, and whatever is on her face Toast cannot read it.

“I don’t go anywhere,” Furiosa says. “I just drive.”

At once, the silence that hangs between them doesn’t feel so comfortable. The air has turned brittle. Liquid nitro sprayed onto steel.

“Sounds a bit lonely,” Toast comments, her voice offhanded and uncommitted.

“I’m used to it. It’s being around people that seems strange to me.”

“People are easy enough to understand,” Toast says, not meaning it. People in the abstract, sure. You can slap any label you want on them. But Toast isn’t sure she’s ever actually understood a single individual person at any point in her life. She learns weaknesses, triggers, potential dangers, and stops at that. It wasn’t often that she cared to dig deeper, before.

Furiosa raises her eyes. For the first time in a long time there’s more than a cool wall of steel, a defense meant to keep prying questions out. This time, there’s a challenge. “I don’t understand you,” she says, holding Toast’s gaze long enough it makes something in her chest turn over like an engine. And then, like every time, Furiosa is climbing into the cockpit of the rig she’s taken as her own, and her hands dart over the controls knowing exactly where they’re needed, metal and flesh. There’s a clink every time she grabs something with her metal arm. Toast wonders about how strong it is. What Furiosa’s eyes would look like if she were to take that hand into her own.

The next time, Toast says nothing at all. Merely waits, not knowing what she waits for, until Furiosa makes the single, curt gesture for Toast to climb into the truck beside her.

 

 

It’s the first time she’s been this far from the citadel since they reclaimed it as their own. Toast had told herself she would never forget the desert, the scouring winds and the scouring sun and the scouring sand, all built to strip away everything soft and replace it with nothing but sand. She has forgotten, though. The Citadel does that—their own little oasis, their holy land. Furiosa hasn’t forgotten. The road is where she lives.

Toast doesn’t think Furiosa is a war-goddess at all. She’s a wanderer, her body built right into the rig that carries her onward, an extension of herself. She feels the road through the palms of her hands and knows exactly how much gas to give it. The patron of the traveler, the one who has no home. It’s no wonder she doesn’t seem to belong. Belonging has nothing to do with it.

They drive from dawn to sunset, saying next to nothing the whole time. They speak in actions now—the turn of a handle, the oiling of gears, little things that keep the rig working smoothly. Furiosa knows them all. By the time they return, Toast knows more.

It happens like that, for a while. Toast learns how to start the rig, the complicated little rituals that are a part of Furiosa’s life. It’s a form of worship in itself, with grease for sacred oils and the smell of gasoline for incense. This is Furiosa’s temple; Toast is the only priest.

They’ve been driving for two days when Furiosa stops the rig. The actions of stopping it are far removed from the end result, when the tons and tons of lumbering steel finally grind to a halt in the hard-packed sand, hissing and seething like an elemental. In that time Toast asks no questions, even though there’s no salvage nearby, nothing worth stopping for at all. As the rig slows, and then stops, she feels that something is about to happen. That something _has_ to happen. That’s how the story goes, isn’t it?

Furiosa does not kiss her. She merely sits there, hands still on the wheel, as if simply waiting for the truck to bring itself back to life so she can do what she does best. Her breathing is slow and measured, the kind of breaths she had taken when the Dag had walked towards a man with a shotgun and a mask of metal over his face, bolt-cutters overlarge in her narrow-boned hands. A preparing kind of silence. Making ready for the attack.

And so it’s Toast who leans over, the motion slow and easy to stop, and presses her fingertips to the darkness smudged on Furiosa’s brow. The oil stains her fingers and leaves tracks on Furiosa’s face as Toast lets her hands wander down. Furiosa watches her, unflinching, as still as stone. This is not what they’re good at, neither of them.

So Toast pulls back and shrugs, as if trying out tenderness was nothing. “Do you want to?” she asks, and Furiosa nods.

 

 

They drive out for longer, more often now, but they always come back. Every time she sees them anew Toast thinks the murals are less and less recognizable. The figures are becoming gods, and leaving them behind. Not so many people know her when she passes them these days. Toast traces her hand over the shape of herself on the wall, touches the little collection of offerings placed at the feet of her effigy. The myths don’t need her help or her definition. They will grow. They will make a wise-woman out of her, or perhaps a soothsayer. Her face will grow lined and wizened in image long before her flesh begins to pucker.

And Furiosa—perhaps she will fade. For what need does peace have of war? The myths will let her go. And that’s where Toast will be, waiting, ready to take what the desert has left of her.


End file.
